Tuesday, May 26, 2009

Richard W. Rahn made an important presentation on February 20, 2001 at FC 2001 in the Cayman Islands entitled, "Why the War on Money Laundering Should be Aborted". Dr. Rahn is a senior fellow of the Cato Institute and the Chairman of the Institute for Global Economic Growth. He also served for two terms (2002-2008) as the first non-Caymanian member of the Board of Directors of the Cayman Islands Monetary Authority, which regulates the world’s largest offshore financial center. Rahn states:

"Financial cryptographers are heroes, because their efforts both increase the economic well being of most of the world’s peoples, and more importantly, preserve their liberty."

"As a result of easily usable and almost unbreakable public key encryption, the Internet, and rapidly developing digital money products, the ability of governments to detect and control the movement of money and other financial assets will be almost impossible without governments knowing everything about everyone’s financial affairs. History teaches us that governments abuse the information they have about their citizens. Both the US Constitution and the UN Declaration of Human Rights recognize and guarantee basic privacy rights, including financial privacy."

Typically a cryptography-oriented event organized by the International Financial Cryptography Association, Financial Cryptography and Data Security Conference is a major international forum for research, advanced development, education, exploration and debate regarding information assurance in the context of finance and commerce. The conference covers all aspects of securing transactions and systems. Submissions focusing on both fundamental and applied real-world deployments are solicited.

The goal of the conference is to bring security and cryptography researchers and practitioners together with economists, bankers, implementers and policy-makers. Intimate and colorful by tradition, the FC program features invited talks, academic presentations and panel discussions.

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About Me

I am an e-Money researcher and a Founding Director of the Bitcoin Foundation. My career has included senior influential posts at Sumitomo Bank, VISA, VeriSign, and Hushmail.

"Free-market protagonists, such as Matonis, regard cybercash as better than traditional government-issued or -regulated money, because it is determined by market forces and thus nonpolitical in nature." --Robert Guttmann, Professor of Economics at Hofstra University, in Cybercash: The Coming Era of Electronic Money, 2002

"Matonis is quite correct that the new technology makes easier the use of multiple private currencies." --Mark Bernkopf, Federal Reserve Bank of New York, in "Electronic Cash and Monetary Policy", 1996

"Matonis argues that what is about to happen in the world of money is nothing less than the birth of a new Knowledge Age industry: the development, issuance, and management of private currencies." --Seth Godin in Presenting Digital Cash, 1995